spacing issue

The screenshot shows my problem. What should I do?

posting a project not a picture…
Prelude.dorico.zip (994 KB)

During this project I have switched back and forth from fingerings above the notes to fingerings beside the notes. I preferred above because it saved space, but important issues came up involving right hand fingering.

I haven’t opened the project, but I’m almost certain the two system breaks on the tightly-spaced systems have the property “wait for next system break” activated in the Properties panel at the bottom of the window. deactivate that property to allow Dorico to spread the music onto more than 1 system if needed. (The property tells Dorico “keep putting music into this system until the next explicit system break” - you can get this if you’ve used the “Make into system” command and subsequently deleted system breaks after the first one.)

(Side note - your tempo change signposts, am I right in thinking they’re from points you’ve drawn in the Time track in Play mode? If you want a rallentando, you can also use the Line tool to draw a straight line in the Time track, with a single point at the start and end. Although you may of course prefer the flexibility of lots of points, which is of course fine!)

Excellent! Had to switch from Write mode to Engrave mode to see the Wait for… property, and sure enough.
Moving on…
You wrote: “they’re from points you’ve drawn in the Time track in Play mode?..” But I don’t use playback or manipulate it as far as I know. I don’t know where those objects came from. Can I globally delete them? What might I have done to put them there?

playing with the Time track…(didn’t know it was there)

All the time track points are gone now but one. Can’t find it on the Time track, don’t care.
Thanks for your help!

I may have copied this project from a previous one to get started. I don’t remember playing with the Time track, which doesn’t mean I didn’t.

Case closed.

Ah well they could have come from a tempo track or something - basically each signpost is a separate tempo change, which you could choose to show in the music if you wanted by selecting them and activating e.g. the “Metronome mark shown” checkbox in the Properties panel. If you input tempo changes in the Time track in Play mode using the Draw tool (the pencil one), you get lots of separate points. If you use the line, you get a steady change in tempo between points at the start and end (like a rallentando/accelerando). Just thought I’d mention it in case it’s useful, as when you have separate points, you get lots of signposts as in your example - you can hide them too.